[Elsie]

...whether DNA was designed or not is immaterial to evolutionary biology.

Huh?

They WHY are the "E" so AGAINST it being discussed?

[shubi]

s...whether DNA was designed or not is immaterial to evolutionary biology.
eHuh?

eThey WHY are the "E" so AGAINST it being discussed?

No one is against first life being discussed. Origin of life is just not in the theory of evolution or necessary to understand the fact of evolution. I think you know this. You certainly have been informed of these facts prior to this post.

[grey_whiskers]

...whether DNA was designed or not is immaterial to evolutionary biology.

Huh?

They WHY are the "E" so AGAINST it being discussed?

Several reasons...

1) If it is designed, then you run against the sticky problem of a designer.
A designer can be supernatural or natural.
If the designer is supernatural, science has no reliable way (according to its methodolgy) of treating the designer.

If the designer is natural, then that just pushes some of the conudrums further away from us, and introduces what may well turn out to be unnecessary complications. "Occam's Razor" (*)

2) If we accept the assumption that the DNA works in a regular fashion, with definite, more-or-less specifiable behaviour given a specific set of conditions, then we can still learn to probe, then to control its behaviour, then to get rich or famous or both by controlling its behaviour. All this without worrying about how it got there or how its properties arose.

In other words, discovering how it works is not the same as discovering how it got there. So for some scientists, worrying about ultimate causes may often be a waste of time from what they'd rather be doing.

And even though there may be the possibility that by delving "the mind of the Maker" and all that, we could find out a lot of nifty-cool stuff, we're not sure that we CAN delve the mind of the Maker...in fact, science doesn't have too good of a track record in handling competing claims of deities, since you can't generally catch them in a test tube. So science prefers to stick with what it knows best.

Cheers! (*)
"Thou shalt not needlessly multiply entities"
as opposed to Saruman's Razor,
"Thou shalt not needlessly multiply ENTS"

Hmm, on second thought, make that Saruman's Axe. :-)